


The Gates of Horn

by ariadnes_string



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Gen, Pre-Series, Tattoos
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-21
Updated: 2013-12-21
Packaged: 2018-01-05 10:19:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,834
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1092729
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ariadnes_string/pseuds/ariadnes_string
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“You’re aware that Virginia law forbids minors getting tattoos without the express permission of their legal guardian?”</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Gates of Horn

**Author's Note:**

  * For [frogy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/frogy/gifts).



> Set about six months before _The Raven Boys_ , but with some spoilers for _The Dream Thieves_.
> 
> I've tried to stick close to canon; apologies for any anomalies.
> 
> Many thanks to harrigan for the invaluable beta!

“You’re aware that Virginia law forbids minors getting tattoos without the express permission of their legal guardian?”

Ronan paused in the doorway of The Gates of Horn, reputedly the best place on the beach for just that.

The proprietor, legs stretched long in front of his chair, pointed a finger at a framed document hanging on the wall near the door, and then went back to whatever he was doing. He held a board or palette in one hand, a brush or pen in the other: painting, Ronan thought. The man was of some indeterminate age over thirty, lean, with long blond hair pulled back in a ponytail, and tanned, weathered skin. A silver stud in the shape of a cross glinted in one ear. He wore a plain grey tank; a sleeve of colored designs ran down one arm—waves and girls in grass skirts and surfboards, all vaguely retro-looking in reds and greens and blacks. 

Just my luck, thought Ronan, some transplanted California beach bum. He could think of no one less likely to understand what he needed. Still, he’d come too far back out now. “Good thing I’m not a minor, then,” he said, inserting the ID he’d procured for the occasion in the man’s line of vision.

“Corvus McNeil, eh?” the man said, taking the ID, his voice light with amusement. “Do your friends call you Cory? Or just Mac?” 

Ronan cursed the flight of fancy that had made him choose that name. Rushing, when he knew he should hold back, play it cool, he opened his wallet, and pulled out some bills. “Look, I’ll pay you double whatever you usually charge—“

But as he held out the money, the man’s expression changed. He was looking not at Ronan’s face, nor at the bills, but at the angry red slashes across both Ronan’s forearms—healing now, but still stark against his pale skin. They were there for the world to see, as always: hiding them with sleeves seemed to Ronan akin to lying.

“Seen some trouble lately?” asked the man.

**A few weeks earlier**

Ronan spent a week in Gansey’s bed before it occurred to them it would be easier if he just moved in.

At least he thought it was a week. There was a period between his collapsing into the passenger seat of the Camaro after Niall Lynch’s wake and his regaining consciousness in Monmouth Manufacturing that remained indistinct. Probably because he was drunk most of the time. 

Gansey spent the week in a nest of blankets on the floor. Ronan wasn’t sure whether that was because Gansey, who had grown up without brothers, was unused to the dog-piling that constituted fraternal life, or whether it was because he was scared of what would happen if he got into bed with Ronan. Probably the former. Nothing about Ronan scared Gansey; it was the bedrock of their friendship.

Since between classes and crew practice, Gansey was rarely home, they communicated mostly through objects. Gansey would leave bottles of orange juice, or neatly folded Latin assignments, or egg biscuits wrapped in greasy paper from the nearby diner, on the crate next to the bed; Ronan, in between trips to the nearest town that would let him buy alcohol with his fake ID, would clear some of the rubble from the lower floor of the building.

Sometimes, though, Ronan would surface from a sodden, dreamless sleep to find Gansey cross-legged on the floor, lamplight glinting off his glasses, flanked by piles of books, and doing complicated things with cardboard. Ronan was sure most of the books were about Glendower, but he thought there might be a few called things like _When Friends Lose Parents_ , or _What to Do When Your Roommate Drinks Too Much_ mixed in with them. He wouldn’t have been surprised to find Gansey had special-ordered one along the lines of _How to Handle Your Drunken, Bereaved Best Friend_.

He’d clamber out of bed, slow, as if his limbs were waterlogged, and settle himself next to Gansey. With clumsy fingers, he’d help him lay out the streets of his miniature Henrietta.

On Sunday, however, he roused himself enough to go to church.

“You reek,” Declan hissed at him over Matthew’s head as Ronan slid into the empty place in their pew. Hardly the most affectionate thing to say to the brother you hadn’t seen since your father’s funeral, but that was Declan for you. 

Matthew pressed his shoulder into Ronan’s and knocked their ankles together. “Hey,” he said. And it was only the suppressed sadness of his greeting that tethered Ronan to his seat for the rest of the Mass.

When he got back to Monmouth Manufacturing, Gansey was waiting outside with a mattress and box spring. Both were brand new, still wrapped in factory plastic. Only Gansey could’ve gotten them delivered first thing on a Sunday morning. 

“Thought you’d need your own bed, if you’re going to be living here,” Gansey said, looking smug. “Help me get them upstairs.”

By the time they’d hauled the mattress set to the second-floor apartment, though, Ronan was weak and shaking. He dropped his end to the ground and dashed for the bathroom.

“You sick?” Gansey asked worriedly, watching Ronan puke from the safety of the doorway.

“Nah,” Ronan gasped, between heaves. “Just sobering up.”

+++

It was a mistake. Not moving in with Gansey, which was the best thing that had happened to Ronan in a long time, but giving up the booze. Without the drinking, the dreams came back.

Things were different in the dreamwood, too. It was the smell he noticed first. Unclean and rotting, sliding between the trees like a sinuous coil: as if the scent meant to wrap itself around Ronan and drag him back to some filthy lair. Then he saw them--ragged black feathers, sharp beaks on human faces, pure malice in their eyes. A loathing, a detestation, rose up in him like nothing he'd ever felt before. He first thought to run; but in the end, he held his ground. Or tried to hold it. The birdmen overpowered him easily, biting, ripping, reveling in his blood.

He didn't know the patch of stubbly grass where he woke up, but it seemed as good a place to die as any. His blood felt warm on his cold skin as it flowed away. He thought he should probably try to live, for Matthew, for Gansey, but true, undreaming darkness closed in on the edges of his vision, then swallowed him whole.

+++

“They want to put you in the psych ward,” Gansey said, when Ronan surfaced in the hospital. “And I don’t know that they’re wrong.” He wore an expression Ronan had never seen on him before: pinched with a kind of anticipatory sadness. Ronan wanted that expression to go away fast and never come back.

He felt simultaneously light as a feather and weighted to the bed. When he tried to move, he found he had IV tubes in the back of each hand, and both arms were bandaged from wrist to elbow. He tried, but he could barely feel the wounds.

“They had to sedate you,” Gansey told him. “You went a little crazy when the doctor tried to stitch you up. Jesus, Ronan.”

Ronan could tell Gansey thought he had done it to himself. He wanted to explain, but he’d promised his father he wouldn’t tell anyone—and he wouldn’t, not even Gansey. 

“Did you find me?” he asked instead.

“No. It was some kid named Noah. I’ve seen him around before—I think. You know him?” Ronan shook his head. “Anyway, he knew enough to come get me—you were right by the building—you looked—“ Gansey cut himself off and turned his head towards the window, where an autumnal light filtered through the trees.

“Gansey, please—" Ronan put all his remaining strength into the request, but it came out as weak and desperate as the sound a baby bird makes, falling out of its nest. “I can’t—you know I can’t—"

Without looking at him, Gansey dropped a hand on Ronan’s shoulder and squeezed. “I know,” he said.

Ronan never found out how Gansey and Declan kept him out of the psych ward—how fast they talked or what strings they pulled—but somehow they did. Declan even let him go back to Monmouth Manufacturing, on the condition that he go back to class and keep his grades up. The horrible look left Gansey’s face, but he did make Ronan, who hated phones, come up with a minimalist code for keeping in touch: “?” Gansey would text; “k,” Ronan would write back.

When he got back to Monmouth Manufacturing, Noah, the boy who had found him lying in a pool of his own blood, seemed to have moved in. That was fine. Noah was around more than Gansey, whose commitments to the crew team and good grades kept him out all day and most evenings. Ronan found he liked the company. Noah was a little vague around the edges, but, unlike Gansey, he was always up for some therapeutic destruction—tossing bricks or loose mortar out the window to see which broke harder, or revving the BMW to impossible speeds.

+++

“Keep your money,” said the proprietor of The Gates of Horn. He closed Ronan’s fingers around the bills and pushed them back towards him. His touch was dry, cooler than Ronan would’ve expected in the unseasonal heat of the day. “I’ll do it for the regular price.” His blue eyes were pale in his tanned face, almost watery, but aware somehow. “Kai,” he said, extending a hand to Ronan. “It’s not the name I was born with either. Tell me what you have in mind.”

Ronan pulled the rolled-up sheaf of papers out of his back pocket and spread them out on the desk. 

Kai whistled. “How’d you dream this up?”

Ronan swallowed hard. Then he realized it was just a figure of speech. Kai could have no idea of how real the birds and vines in Ronan's crude sketch had the potential to be. He couldn't know the labor Ronan, gritty-eyed from lack of sleep, had put into rendering them in pen and ink: couldn't know his desperate hope that capturing them on paper would diffuse their power over his dreams. 

Kai, still studying the drawings, didn't appear to notice Ronan's discomfort. “Better to have some nightmares on our bodies, instead of inside our heads, am I right, brother?” he asked, sounding like some kind of surfer guru from the movies; the fact that he so closely echoed Ronan's own thoughts only made the pronouncement more annoying. “I’ll work it out for you—it’ll take two sessions, maybe more; can you come Tuesday at 5?“

If he took off right after American Civ—maybe cut out ten minutes early—he could make it. “Sure,” Ronan said. 

+++

When Noah found Ronan contorting himself in front of the bathroom mirror, making sure he’d buzzed all his hair to the same brutally minimalist length, he just shrugged and said, “Gonna be cold in the winter, dude.”

Gansey, in contrast, did a literal double take. He reached a hand towards Ronan's head as if he wanted to touch the bristles for himself, then let it drop. “I miss the old Ronan,” he said, a tinge of that sadness coming back into his eyes.

+++

“ _Sunt geminae Somni portae, quarum altera fertur, /cornea, qua veris facilis datur exitus umbris_ ," Ronan muttered. He was sitting shirtless over a chair in the curtained-off studio in the back of The Gates of Horn. The space wasn’t the chrome and glass laboratory he’d half-expected—though why he’d expected that, he had no idea. Instead, the reddish walls of the small room held pictures of beaming customers displaying their tattoos, interspersed with more sober line drawings of landscapes, almost Japanese-looking. Mysterious devices and ink containers crowded the makeshift shelves.

Kai had shown him a stencil of the design he’d worked out from Ronan’s sketch—the figures elongated, made elegant and mysterious. “Hope you don’t mind I took some liberties—I wanted to integrate this with this,” he'd pointed to the relevant parts of the images, “and make the whole thing work better with the line of your body.” He'd looked at Ronan dispassionately, like an artist looking at a canvas, which was probably the truth of the thing. Ronan had felt himself blushing anyway. “Look okay?”

Ronan had nodded. It looked better than okay; it looked as if Kai understood his dreams more clearly than Ronan could.

Once he’d gotten the design situated on the right part of Ronan’s lower back, Kai had started mixing inks and positioning his needles. The needles hurt, but not in a bad way—more bearable than the sharp prick of memory.

“ _Altera candenti perfecta nitens elephanto,/sed falsa ad caelum mittunt insomnia Manes_ ,” Ronan went on. It felt good to roll the words along his tongue, slide them under his breath.

“What’s that?” Kai looked up. From where Ronan was sitting, he could see Kai’s face in the mirror in front of him, though not what Kai was doing to his back.

“Hmm?” Ronan hadn’t realized he was speaking loud enough for anyone to hear. “Sorry. It's the part in the _Aeneid_ where they talk about the gates of horn and ivory—true and false dreams. The name of your place made me think about it. It's part of Aeneas's journey to the underworld.” He was babbling, he realized, and he tried to rein himself in. "Is that where you named the shop from?"

Kai nodded. “Well, that idea, anyway. Though I read about in the _Odyssey_. I loved that book when we read it in school. All that crazy shit, all those monsters.” His voice, which Ronan had come to know as soft and flat—the epitome of surfer coolness—took on a different tone, sharper, more interested. “The _Aeneid_ ’s in Latin, right? You know Latin?”

Ronan nodded.

"Greek too?"

“Nah—just Latin.” Suddenly, Ronan wanted to explain how Latin felt to him—truer, clearer than his native tongue—but the words escaped him. “It’s my favorite subject,” he said, feeling puerile.

“Cool. I never learned any of those languages—just the English translations for us. But I think if I’d gone to college, that’s what I would’ve studied—all those old guys and their stories. Anyway, when I got a chance to buy this store, that’s the first idea that came to me. The Gates of Horn—the gates true dreams pass through. ‘Cause what are tattoos, anyway? They’re dreams you put on your body—dreams you make true. You okay, man?” he asked, because Ronan had shivered sharply, under his hands.

Ronan was saved from further explanation by the mechanical jingle of Kai's cell phone. Kai turned off his ink gun and dug in the pocket of his jeans for it. "Sorry, man, I got to take this," he said, already pulling himself upright. "Be back in a sec."

And then Kai was past the velvet drapes that separated the workplace from front of the store. But not before Ronan had seen the sharp flash of worry in his eyes.

Left alone, Ronan levered himself off the chair. He craned his neck, trying to see what Kai had already put on his back; but the lines and blacked-in areas didn't add up to much so far. He turned to the pictures on the walls instead. The satisfied looks of the customers in the photos were reassuring, as were the sharp lines of their tattoos. More intriguing were the black-and-white drawings intermixed with the portraits. They were paintings, not sketches; the delicate strokes that brought the landscapes to vivid life had clearly been made with a brush, not a pen. California, Ronan would've guessed, if he'd had to place the scenes of rocky beaches, the towering waves, the hints of mist in cliff faces. Nothing like the green, smooth mountains of Virginia, its fertile hollows. He wondered what it would be like to live amidst such grandeur. 

"Like them?" Kai asked.

Startled, Ronan whirled around. Kai's face had returned to its usual calm, his voice to its usual affectless rumble, but Ronan thought he might be a bit paler, under his tan.

"Yeah," he said, not daring to ask what the phone call had meant, sticking to the safer subject of the paintings. "They yours?"

"Uh-huh. I like to fool around with that stuff when I'm not doing this." He gestured towards the tattooing paraphernalia. "I'm trying to teach myself Japanese ink wash painting: sumi-e. You know it?"

Ronan shook his head. He had no idea. "This looks like a cool place," he said, pointing to a beach enclosed by tall, white cliffs.

"Point Reyes," Kai said. The words seemed to break the spell the phone call had laid over him; he sounded interested again, alert. "That's right near where I grew up."

"Who's this?" Ronan pointed at the next picture over, the only painting of a person among all the landscapes. It showed a young man, sitting on a beach next to his surf board, arms around his knees. His hair was long, like Kai's, and loose around his shoulders. His head was thrown back, laughing.

"Old boyfriend," Kai said. He flicked an imaginary spot of dust off the painting. "I like this one--I feel like I caught something of his personality, y'know?" And it was true: a vivid charge of fun, almost danger, came off the picture, although the man was seated, entirely at ease. "Hey--I don't mean to rush you, but I've got someone else coming in at seven, so we should probably get going again."

+++

Back in Henrietta, Ronan added the new marks on his back to the list of secrets he kept in his head. He'd managed to slip in and out of town without ringing any of Gansey's alarm bells. He went to class, and to his almost entirely silent meetings with the counselor from the hospital he'd agreed to see (see, not talk to, that seemed the operative term). Things were good, if that was something you could say about a world in which your father had been murdered.

Best of all, the tattoo seemed to act as the ward he'd hoped for: the birdmen disappeared from his dreams.

One night, a few days before he was scheduled to go back to the Gates of Horn to complete the tattoo, Ronan saw something new in the dreamwood: a stand of slender trunks, their leaves a lighter green than those of the surrounding trees. Bamboo, Ronan realized as he approached them. He wondered what they were doing there, out of place and season among the firs and hardwoods; but almost before he came amongst them, he knew.

He'd only seen pictures of the bamboo brushes used for sumi-e, when he'd googled the art form on one of the school computers when he was supposed to be looking up population facts about some South American country. But the images had stuck in his mind: beautiful instruments of pale wood, with delicate bristles drawn from sheep or goats or even wolves. He placed his hand on the smooth bark of the dream-bamboo, caressed it for a moment, getting its heft and density; then he gently dug his fingers in and pulled.

A brush lay in his hand. Ronan had never touched real bamboo, much less the pelt of a wolf, so he wasn't sure he'd gotten this right. The wood might be too heavy, he thought, the hair too smooth. Still, he knew he could bring it back with him. And he knew what he'd do with it, once he returned to the waking world.

+++

When Ronan parked the BMW in front of The Gates of Horn for the second and final session, he found Kai leaning against the storefront, smoking. Ronan sat in the car for a moment, considering; he’d never seen Kai smoke before, never smelled tobacco on him. Something was going on, clearly, and for a moment he considered turning around and heading back towards the mountains. Finally, he eased himself out of the car, though, as casually as he could, and approached.

“Didn’t know you smoked,” he said.

“Calms the nerves,” Kai said, tapping ash off the end of the cigarette. He looked at Ronan like he didn’t recognize him, his pale eyes slightly unfocused. “Want one?”

Ronan shook his head, feeling the heat of the afternoon close in around him. It was one of those unpleasant Indian summer days when the air itself feels trapped, dreaming of true autumn under a soggy blanket of humidity. Sweat started to bead at the base of Ronan's spine. 

“Sorry,” Kai said, voice flat. “Closed today. I can’t work.” He transferred the cigarette from his right hand to his left, and extended the right. The tiniest tremor ran through it.

“Oh.” Ronan closed his hand around the dreamwood brush in his pocket. He felt disappointed out of all measure to the situation. “Right.” 

His voice must not have been as casual as he intended, though, because Kai straightened up and seemed to see him for the first time. “Sorry,” he said, in a different voice altogether. “Really, man—I know you come a long way for this, your last session, too—I shoulda called, but I, uh, I got some bad news today, and everything just went to shit, y’know?”

Ronan did know, knew how that could be, but before he could answer, Kai went in a different direction entirely. “You wanna hang out for a bit, since you’re already here? Go down to the beach? Bet you haven’t seen the beach, as many times as you’ve been here.”

It was true, Ronan hadn’t seen the beach, but that was because he hated beaches—the sand that got between your toes, the vast exposed light of them, the faraway horizon. He was surprised, therefore, to find himself nodding. 

“Great.” Kai smiled, looking almost like himself again. “I could use the company.” 

The public beach was near enough to walk. Kai didn’t volunteer any more information about what had made him close the shop as they passed through the quiet streets, and Ronan couldn’t bring himself to ask. The day had settled into an oppressive grayness, though the sun still generated a vicious glare behind its scrim of clouds. Ronan could feel the warm, wet air tangling his steps, like a living thing. Or maybe that was Kai’s melancholy, which came off him in black waves. Ronan tried to remember a world without sadness, or at least one where he wasn't hyper-attuned to its smallest sign. He failed.

“I wish it would storm,” Kai said, as they made their way across the wooden walkway over the dunes.

The beach was deserted, except for a woman walking an arthritic chocolate lab, and a guy with his fishing lines set up in front of his folding chair, beers in each cup holder. 

Kai lifted both arms, stretching towards the sky. “It’s always better down here,” he said, and, in truth, the air was clearer on the beach, laced with small gusts of wind so laden with salt Ronan could taste it as well as smell it. But in the grey brightness of the afternoon, the beach was shadowless, sand shading into the glass-smooth sea, sea shading into pearly sky without distinction. Ronan felt disorientated, exposed.

“Come on,” Kai said. “No waves, but you won’t believe how warm the water is for this time of year.” He kicked off his flip flops, and balanced on one foot then the other as he rolled up the legs of his jeans.

Ronan didn’t move. He watched Kai walk to the water’s edge, his eyes caught by the lines of lean muscle in Kai’s calves. As Kai freed his hair from its habitual ponytail, a gust of wind took it, spreading pale gold strands against the opalescent sky. The beauty of it stilled Ronan for a moment, kept him even from breathing. Then Kai was in the water up to his ankles, gathering up his hair again and staring at the space where the horizon should’ve been. 

Something about the sight made Ronan shiver, as if a shadow, or the threat of a shadow, had moved across his vision. He was suddenly certain the birdmen were here—that they had escaped the dreamwood and followed him all the miles from Henrietta to the shore. But when he looked around, the wide stretch of sand was as featureless as before, broken only by the old dog galumphing after a tennis ball, the motionless lump of the fisherman in his chair, and Kai’s contemplation of the infinite. A vee of pelicans flew mere feet above the water, dipping occasionally to seize a fish.

A sudden burst of fury seized Ronan, though he hardly knew at what—unless it was at the dreams themselves, for pushing into even this peaceful place, this unexpected moment of companionship. He looked around for a piece of driftwood, found one a few yards off, and hurled it with a ragged grunt towards the ocean. 

It landed short of its goal, skidding on the pebbles near the waterline. But the sound broke Kai’s reverie. He turned and waded back towards Ronan. 

“You okay?” he called. “Look at you—you’re going red even in these clouds. We should get you inside.”

“Sorry,” Ronan muttered, embarrassed by Kai's concern, and by his ridiculously transparent skin, unwilling to admit it was emotion, not UV rays, that was raising his color. “I’m not good with heat.”

“No, no—you can’t be too careful. I should’ve thought to bring some sunscreen. Besides, I don’t know about you, but I’m ready for a drink.”

Kai’s mood seemed to have been marginally lightened by getting his feet wet. He led a willing Ronan to a bar a few blocks away from the oceanfront streets. The place had fading green paint on its storefront, and blacked-out windows. A sprawl of unlit neon letters spelled out its name, but they were indecipherable in the growing murk of the day.

“We’ll get some rain yet,” Kai said, opening the door.

Ronan drew a welcome breath of dry, cool, beery air. The bar was dim after the glare of the day, and sparsely inhabited, but a group of men Kai’s age and older were squeezed into one of the booths farthest from the door, chairs pulled up for those who didn’t fit. They turned when Kai and Ronan entered, raising their hands in greeting, some standing, as if his coming had been expected.

“So sorry,” the men murmured, with the intimacy of old friends, as Kai and Ronan approached them, and “He was great guy—gonna miss him.” They shook Kai’s hand, or rubbed his shoulder. One, older, with clipped white hair, kissed him on the mouth, but it seemed a gesture of comfort, not possession. Kai nodded, but didn’t say much. He didn’t introduce Ronan, and though the men eyed him curiously, they didn’t say anything either. After a few minutes, Kai steered Ronan towards the bar, hand firm on his bicep.

The bartender was a heavy-set man in early middle-age, bald and bearded, with tattoos twining his wrists that Ronan thought might be Kai’s work. “So sorry, man,” he said, setting a pint glass of beer and a shot in front of Kai. “This one’s on me.”

“Thanks, Ed.” Kai pulled out his wallet and put a five on the bar. “How ‘bout a beer for my friend Corvus, too?”

Ed’s eyebrows went up at the word friend, and he looked at Kai with something like amusement. “Nice to see you with someone, Kai, but I’m not sure I should serve him.”

Kai laughed. “Shut up, Ed—it’s not like that. And I’ve seen his ID—Corvus is definitely of age.”

Ed drew Ronan a beer, smirking slightly. Ronan thought they’d bring their drinks back to the table of Kai’s friends, but Kai seemed content to remain on the barstools. He knocked back the shot, then sipped his beer, staring into the bubbles, melancholy twining over him again like vines. 

Someone had died then, Ronan thought, putting the pieces together—though he felt like he’d known that the minute he’d seen Kai leaning on the wall smoking. He felt like he had a sixth sense for death, these days.

“I’m sorry, too,” he said, the beer giving him a burst of courage. “About your friend—was it him you got the phone call about, before?”

Kai nodded, but didn’t say anything.

“So—so I guess it wasn’t a sudden thing, then?” Ronan said, then cursed himself for his awkward prying.

Kai didn’t seem to take offense, though. “Nope. Cancer’s a son of bitch, that’s for sure. Slow as fuck.” He’d lost focus again, like the whiskey had gone straight to his head. Ronan wondered if he’d had anything but cigarettes all day—he knew that feeling, too.

“It doesn’t matter,” Ronan said in a rush. “Slow or fast—it sucks to lose someone.”

Kai looked up at this—something in Ronan’s voice must’ve betrayed him again—and reached out, almost touching the healed wounds on Ronan’s arm, but not quite. “Was it death that troubled you, Corvus?” he said softly, almost slurred. “All this time, I thought it must be love—stupid me, projecting again.”

Embarrassed, Ronan pulled his hands off the bar and shoved them in his pockets. His left hand closed around the brush—he’d forgotten it during their visit to the beach.

He willed himself to stay silent, but he heard himself asking, in a strained voice, “Was he family?”

Kai snorted, seeming to find this funny. “No—or not family like people usually mean it, anyway.”

“Oh. Was he—I mean—were you –?“ Ronan’s mind churned, giving him only unutterable Latin words— _Amicus, Amador_.

“Me and Sean? No,” Kai said, seeming to grasp what he was getting at, and snorting again. “Or yeah, for a while, a long time ago. But mostly—for a long time—friends. Friends are better sometimes—good friends, anyway, y’know?”

Ronan did know. Knew so fiercely his heart hurt. He pulled the brush out of his pocket, wishing he’d thought to wrap in something, even to find a bag. “Here,” he said, sliding it along the bar to Kai. “I found this. I thought it might be good for your paintings.”

He waited, almost holding his breath, as he watched Kai run his long, narrow fingers across the bristles, then down the wood of the handle.

“It’s beautiful, Corvus; it’s perfect. Thank you,” Kai said. His voice sounded a bit thick, but that was probably the whiskey. “What kind of wood is this? It's like bamboo, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen it before.”

Ronan shrugged—and then was saved from further explanation by one of Kai’s friends coming up to them and throwing an arm around Kai’s shoulders. “Another round for everyone,” the man said to Ed. Then, to Kai, “Come on over, baby—Doug’s just telling that story about the time Sean got lost on Fire Island.”

Clearly this was a funny story, because Kai let out a reluctant-sounding laugh. “Lost his bathing suit is more like it,” he said, swinging off the bar stool. He looked at Ronan, weirdly as if he were asking permission, and Ronan nodded.

Ronan pulled a chair up to the edge of the group and nursed his second beer, watching Kai get drawn closer and closer to the center of things. It was strange to observe other people’s friendships; these men were so affectionate with each other, touching and hugging, calling each other sweetheart and darling. Ronan wondered if they were always like this, or whether the occasion and the afternoon drinking were bringing it out in them. Sean appeared to have been quite a character, or at least the kind of guy who generated a lot of stories. He’d been a social worker, or maybe a nurse, but also a traveler and an inveterate collector of interesting people—people who inevitably invited him to parties or weekend getaways and thus into more stories. 

Ronan tried to imagine Sean encountering a younger Kai—maybe back when Kai still had whatever name he’d been born with—and leading him into adventures. But before he could flesh out the image too much, he became aware that his cell phone was buzzing insistently in his pocket, had perhaps been intermittently doing so for some time.

He knew what he’d find before he drew it out: a string of message alerts trailing down the screen, all from the same number: “?” “?””?” “?”

Chagrined, Ronan quickly tapped in “k” and sent it. The time had gotten away from him, and Gansey had clearly come back from the library and panicked. In an uncharacteristic burst of communicativeness, Ronan wrote: “Running an errand—back in 2 or 3 hrs.”

“2 or 3 hrs—WTF?” came back at him, but this time Ronan didn’t answer.

He stood, thinking he’d make his way out without interrupting the ongoing stream of talk, but Kai’s head swung around as soon as Ronan pushed his chair back, his eyebrows lifting questioningly. Ronan shrugged, and mimed pointing at the watch he didn’t wear. Kai turned the corners of his mouth down in good-natured disappointment—his melancholy seemed to be mellowing in the companionable sympathy of his friends: _Next week?_ he mouthed. Ronan nodded. It seemed a paltry exchange with which to end an afternoon that somehow seemed momentous, but he felt too shy to say anything more.

The storm had come and gone unnoticed while he’d been inside the bar. The streets were wet with rain, but the air was cooler and dryer. Ronan found the BMW again more by luck than through any memory of the route they’d taken from the store to the beach to the bar. He turned it back onto 64 just as the early autumn twilight turned decisively to night.

Gansey was sitting on the hood of the Camaro when Ronan pulled up, looking more tense and unhappy than Ronan had seen him since that day in the hospital.

“God damn it, Ronan,” said Gansey, sliding down from his perch on the Pig, swinging his arms like he wanted to hit something. “You cannot—I mean, you just can’t—. I’ve made _promises_ \--to those people at the hospital, to your asshole brother—Just. Where the hell have you been?”

Ronan didn’t know what to say. Gansey deserved better than his silence, but the words wouldn’t form themselves in his head. Instead, he pulled his black muscle tee over his head and turned around, letting Gansey see what he’d been hiding for weeks.

He heard Gansey’s breath catch, though he couldn’t see his face. “Oh,” Gansey said. “It’s—“ 

“-only half-done,” Ronan supplied, before Gansey could find his own adjective. 

Ronan felt Gansey’s fingers, very lightly, trace the central line of the tattoo from the small of his back to a point between his shoulder blades. "--dangerous," he said, finishing the sentence for himself. Though whether he meant the tattoo, or Ronan himself, Ronan couldn't say. 

+++

Gansey, of course, demanded to come to Ronan’s final session at The Gates of Horn. “To see what kind of place is willing to give an illegal tattoo to a half-crazy teenager,” was how he put it. “Someone should check them out, since you’re obviously not thinking clearly.”

Ronan let him. He owed Gansey that much, and he was grateful Gansey had neither tried to stop him from completing the tattoo, nor turned him in to Declan. They took the Camaro, and when they got there, Gansey, dressed in his best Young Republican combo of khakis and salmon-pink polo, prowled around the place like a Congressional delegation on Workplace Health, asking innumerable questions about sterilization procedures and contaminated waste disposal.

Kai took it all in stride, neither defensive, nor condescending—perhaps he was used to this kind of thing. “Do you want to watch?” he asked Gansey, once it was clear that everything met with his approval.

Ronan was a little sad when Gansey accepted the invitation. After their last afternoon together, he found himself wanting to be alone with Kai, though he had no idea what they would talk about. As it was, no one said much of anything, as Kai positioned the stencil and Ronan nodded his approval. Gansey leaned against the wall, arms folded, looking baleful. 

When Kai arrived at the final part of the tattoo, the snaking claws and vines that would run partway up Ronan’s neck, he spread his hand over the top of Ronan’s hip and said, “This part is going to hurt.”

And so it did, the sting of the tiny needles much sharper there than in the less nerve-rich areas of his back. A sound he thought might be Gansey grinding his teeth was just audible over the whir of the ink gun. Ronan declined Latin verbs in his head, and focused not on his neck, but on the place Kai had touched him: if he concentrated hard, he could still feel the ghostly warmth of his hand. 

After what seemed like a long time, Kai shut off the machine. “Looks good,” he said. “Let’s see what you think.”

As before, he held up a mirror so that Ronan could see the leaves and wings and eyes twining up his back. It was surreal, to have those images transposed from his dreams to his skin. He thought he might get lost in them, as he sometimes feared losing himself in the dreamwood; the newest part, the part that would be visible over the collar of his shirt, seemed most dangerous. 

“Satisfied?” Kai asked. Ronan, not trusting his voice, nodded. Kai reached out to an unmarked part of Ronan’s shoulder and squeezed.

Gansey, who had apparently seen enough, or perhaps too much, cleared his throat. “I’ll leave you two to settle up,” he said, and left the room.

They didn’t say much after he’d gone. Kai applied the same dressings he’d applied to the lower half of the tattoo and gave Ronan the same rote instructions on aftercare. Back in the front of the shop, Ronan handed over the stack of bills he’d brought and Kai counted them gravely into the register.

“Take care of yourself, Ronan Lynch,” he said, when he raised his head again.

Ronan’s stomach clenched. He wondered whether it would do any good to run now. Maybe Gansey had the motor running.

“How—?” he gasped. “Did you always know?”

Kai shook his head. “No—not until last week, in the bar, when we were talking about death.” His mouth quirked ruefully. “It jogged something my memory—your face changes when you look sad instead of angry. So I looked it up—found the pictures in the paper from when your father died.” Ronan remembered; the shock of seeing his old school picture alongside Declan and Matthew’s, callow in black and white. “Doesn’t matter—same risk for me either way.”

“Thank you,” said Ronan, holding out his hand. He didn’t know what else to do.

“You’re welcome,” said Kai, taking it. “Come back in a few years. Tattoos and beers are the limit of the illegal things I’m willing to do with you right now. But when you’re a bit older—“ He smiled, a different smile than Ronan had seen so far, one he imagined going with things like bonfires on the beach, and fast drives on hot afternoons.

He couldn’t answer it with one of his own; he felt too hot and confused to do anything with his face. But he squeezed Kai’s hand like a promise.

Gansey did indeed have the motor running. “Get what you came for?” he asked, as Ronan slipped carefully into the passenger seat, mindful of the prickling ache of his back and neck.

"Guess so." And Ronan thought maybe he had; maybe he'd come away with something that couldn't be reduced to the design that now covered half his back. 

"He seemed like a nice guy, even if he did play a little fast and loose with the law," Gansey said, eyes on the road ahead.

"Kinda old," said Ronan, and was horrified to hear the words come out not scoffing, as he'd intended, but wistful, with maybe a little bit of yearning thrown in. He didn't dare look at Gansey, afraid of seeing distaste, or worse yet, that sadness, in his eyes.

But Gansey was laughing. He took one hand off the wheel and scrubbed his knuckles across Ronan's scalp. “One of these days, Ronan Lynch, you’re going to do something that makes me not recognize you anymore.”

But when Ronan finally summoned the courage to turn his head, he could see in Gansey’s face that that day had not yet come.


End file.
